Value and Conclusion

At US $599 a piece, two Radeon HD 5970 accelerators should typically set you back by $1200. You will also need a motherboard with two PCI-Express slots, which supports ATI CrossFire technology.

Fastest setup possible

Support for DirectX 11, DirectX 10.1

Some things just look better in pairs™

Low idle power consumptions of each card makes overall idle power draw comfortable

Excusably quiet in idle

GDDR5 memory

Support for software based voltage control

Support for AMD EyeFinity Technology

Native HDMI & DisplayPort

Improvements to integrated HDMI audio device

High price, really!

Fails several game tests at 2560x1600

Not useful for resolutions lower than 2560x1600

Requires a CrossFire supportive motherboard with two PCI-Express slots

Massive heat output

DirectX 11 won't be relevant for quite a while

No support for CUDA / PhysX

9.3

It sure isn't the most sensible thing to spend $1200 on two graphics cards, that dump about 600W of heat in your room when fully loaded, that barely fit inside your computer, and that make a quite some fan noise. But oh boy, the frames fly like you've never seen before! The "All Resolutions" performance summary graph simply doesn't do justice as HD 5970 CrossFire gets irrelevant, and CPU-limited in lower resolutions. 2560x1600 seems to be the only resolution where having a pair of these will allow you to splurge on eye-candy like never before.If you want to build the fastest rig money can buy then a HD 5970 CrossFire setup is what you need. Die-hard overclockers all over the planet will open their wallets and camp the online stores to get a pair of these, unfortunately supply will be limited.Should you not belong to the most extreme crowd of gamers or tweakers then it might make more sense to get a single HD 5970 or "only" a HD 5870 because these cards offer much better price/performance ratios. It should also be noted that the drivers do not seem to be in a fully finalized state yet. Three of our benchmarks failed to run at 2560x1600, which, for this kind of product, is the only resolution that really counts in the results. I am confident however that AMD will quickly address these issues in a future driver version.